Using the qsub -v option is the proper way:

qsub -v par_name=par_value[,par_name=par_value...] script.sh 

par_name can be used as variable in the shell script.

In addition to volk's answer, in order to reference the variables in the list (designated by -v) you simply use the name you define in your call. So, say you made a call to qsub as follows

qsub -v foo='qux' myRunScript.sh

Then myRunScript.sh could look something like this:

#!/bin/bash #PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=16,walltime=0:00:59 #PBS -l mem=62000mb #PBS -m abe bar=${foo} echo "${bar}" 

Where the output would be

qux 

Hope this helps!

There is a better way...

I'm really surprised at how long this question has gone without a good answer. It may be that the specific version of qsub wasn't specified. qsub exists in at least Torque and also Sun Grid Engine, maybe other schedulers. So, it's important to know which you're using. I'll talk about a few here:

TORQUE: qsub -F <arguments> command

man page
Here's an example of how I normally use it. Starting with this example script which just echoes any arguments passed to it:

$ cat testArgs.pbs #!/usr/bin/env bash echo $@ 

I would submit the job like this:

$ qsub -F "--here are the --args" testArgs.pbs 3883919.pnap-mgt1.cm.cluster 

And this is what the output file looks like after it runs:

$ cat testArgs.pbs.o3883919 --here are the --args 

Sun Grid Engine: qsub command [ command_args ]

man page
You just add the arguments after the command, same as you would when executing in the shell. I don't have SGE running anywhere, so no example for this one. But it's the same with Slurm, which is below

Slurm: sbatch command [ command_args ]

man page
Here I submit the same script I used with the Torque example above:

$ sbatch testArgs.sh what the heck Submitted batch job 104331 

And the results:

$ cat slurm-104331.out what the heck 

Exporting environment variables != passing arguments

Exporting environment variables is very different from passing arguments to a command.
Here is a good discussion on the differences.

The qsub answers above all recommend -v. To be clear, -v exports environment variables, -F passes arguments to the command.

I generally prefer to parameterize my scripts by allowing for arguments. In fact, I would say it's much more common to use scripts like this process_data.sh --threads 8 than doing something like export THREADS=8; process_data.sh.